


The Opposite of Whole

by Eilinelithil



Series: Thoughts On A Happy Ending [3]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-25 03:17:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12521756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eilinelithil/pseuds/Eilinelithil
Summary: Belle reflects on everything – to whom the reflection is addressed remains unspoken. Focus is Season 2 Episode 1, but references events from the life of the series to date - this story is the third in what will probably be a long series.





	The Opposite of Whole

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don’t own them – if I did I’d treat them a whole hell of a lot better than ABC did.

True love… the power of it is all consuming, though sometimes so quiet that it sits unnoticed in your heart until something wakens it. Then it roars aloud, refusing to be ignored, subsuming everything of you. It took years for me to accept that, let alone to understand.

In some ways, for those reasons, there’s a part of me that should _thank_ Regina – or the curse – whichever was, in truth, responsible for me not remembering my past for all of those years that I was locked away, because if I had known, if I _had_ remembered, I would have missed my Rumplestiltskin to the point of heartbreak.

I truly believe, feeling as I do now, having lived the years of our lives in Storybrooke together; having experienced the loss of my love, not once but times over – the last at my own lack of faith – I would have died from it.

Rumple is by far the stronger of us, though he would tell you otherwise, and it took me far too long to believe it and understand that even with my own strength I _did_ need him; his love, his protection, his all-consuming and constant compromises – in his own way – of our true love, and his needs as a part of it.

As we stood there, at the well, the mist of the returning magic swirling, still, around our feet, he turned to me and spoke in a softer voice than I have heard him use before.

“My darling, Belle,” he said, and his endearment then, as always, melted over me, warming like a soft blanket, “You have to tell me what happened to you.”

“I was abducted,” I answered with the truth of what had happened to me in our Enchanted Forest home.

“Regina?” he asked, though without necessity as we both knew the answer, and I nodded.

“She locked me away until her curse, and I’ve been in the asylum ever since.”

I could see the reflection of my own emotions: bitterness, anger, fear, loneliness and longing, and hatred – a terrifying emotion in any event, but when contrasted with the consuming love flowing in my heart just at that moment, it was even more pointed.  I could see it all reflected on Rumple’s face, in his eyes… even in the way he stood, and I knew it was also in his heart, and I feared for the surge of darkness it must have been amplifying there and in his soul as he spoke again.

“For 28 years?” And I could do no other than nod in confirmation, feeling those emotion surge in my _own_ heart, threatening to choke me, until I pushed them down again. “All these years, you’ve been here. Alive.”

Fear for him again drove my answer… but _for_ him, not _of_ him. Never that.

“Is that… is that why you did this?” I asked, “Why you wanted magic? For revenge?”

He softened, the harsh expression of hatred that had settled on his face melted into an expression of love again, reserved for me, but only for a moment, before he spoke.

“Oh, no,” he said, then the expression changed again, back to anger, back to the harsh sarcasm that dripped from his words when he added, “But it might come in handy.”

“No,” I forbade him, tried at least “No!”

“I cannot let this stand, Belle,” he reasoned, “I _will_ not let this stand!”

He had a point.  He _always_ had a point, though I rarely saw it, even unto the end. Then I took his hands and imploring with my body, my eyes… the contact of our skin, I said, “Promise me. Promise me you won’t give in to your hate. Promise me you won’t kill her.”

He looked away, said nothing, but I could see the wheels turning in his mind. His mind was ever sharp, ever looking for the _letter_ of the deals he made, the inbuilt paths of pedantry and sophistry that _always_ exist in any contract to give the determined a way out, or around, any aspect that did not quite meet their own needs. Hindsight tells me that – unconsciously, at least – I worded the request that way so that he _might_ find my loopholes, but was I enabling in _him_ the need to protect and cherish me, or in _myself_ , my unexpressed capacity for darkness? I would come back to that question later that day.

To bring him back to me from the paths he still walked in his mind, I added, “Promise me, and we can be together.”

He reached out then, caressing my face; responding to my _blatant_ manipulation with the subtle gentleness of his own, mirroring control of the play of love between us.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he murmured, “I promise.”

We kissed then, the softness of his words translating into the downy press of his kiss, _our_ kiss, truly shared, _desperately_ missed. As it ended we wrapped our arms so tightly around each other that nothing could separate us – come between us – laying the foundations of our own push and pull that would inevitably keep us together and tear us apart, until we created the one that would tear everything down that we had built up between us, until all that is left is our realization of the truth of our love.

How I miss it… miss _him._ Where daily thoughts of him, and nightly dreams waken me breathless from some vision of his warmth, his words, his touch… the presence of him as a part of me, without which I am not whole – never whole.

They say you should never listen at keyholes; that it never turns out well if you do. It is advice I have always known, and tried to follow since my experiences with my mother and father, a long, long time ago now, even before the Ogre Wars ravaged our home… in the days before Rumple.

You might have expected, therefore, that I would remember that advice as I sat in the back room of Rumple’s shop, resting; waiting for him to bring the tea through – a true reversal of roles from our previous life together – while trying to make sense of everything that had happened since the stranger walked into my cell in the asylum, and set me free.

Freedom – a strange word, and stranger concept in respect of the way we, each of us, make prisoners of ourselves according to the events of our lives.  Back in the Enchanted Forest, Rumple had set me free, albeit in as ungentle a manner as he has ever treated me, but I had confined myself by my own expectations, my own needs – though I think others would see it as a positive trait – to always see the best in people. I’ve been hurt by that more than once, but… I know now I only hurt myself.

There is nothing _wrong_ in seeing the best in others, the error comes in trying to force change upon them before they are ready to accept it in themselves… that ‘good,’ the ‘best,’ the ‘light.’ That was always my problem with Rumple.

It’s not that it was never there.  It was. I could always see the light behind the darkness, the good behind the evil… The Savior beneath the mantle of the Dark one. My error was in expecting Rumple to accept it before his life’s path took him to the place where he might realize it in himself.

So, the push and pull continued; the conflict in our relationship that had begun in the Dark Castle, a troubled road that unfailingly brought us back to each other, face to face with the unfathomable love we held… _hold_ for each other.

On this day, it began with the ringing of the bell above the door of the shop, and three sets of footsteps coming inside, punctuated by Rumple’s question.

“What can I do for you?”

“What you can do is tell us what you did.”

The woman’s voice was sharp, combative, and held little room for misinterpretation in its demand. Still, Rumple, in the quiet way I’ve come to know his resistance – a dash of sarcasm, mixed with a hint of resolve – refused acquiescence to her demand.

“I’m sorry, you’re gonna have to be more specific,” he said.

“You know damn well what we’re talking about.”

This speaker a man, his voice half raised in pique against Rumple’s avoidance, and followed up – one might have said _supported_ – by the following words from a woman, different from the first, but equally, if not more, belligerent.

“You double-crossed Emma, you uh, took your, uh, potion from her,” she accused, and I could only assume that she was referring to the potion that Rumple had dropped into the well in order to bring magic to Storybrooke.

“And did who-knows-what to this town,” the male voice added in what might have been an ending to their litany of accusations. I should have listened to my own intuition then, perhaps, but what difference would it have made?

My hackles had risen, as I could feel that so little had changed between _then_ and now. Rumple was still who he was, had always been. In spite of his appearance, presumably rendered ‘normal’ by the enacting of Regina’s curse, he was still the Dark One; still working to his own agenda, still scheming. I should have stepped out from the back room, and confronted… whom?

I know these people now in a way I never imagined, as Family… and yes, the capital letter you might hear in my voice is deliberate. Emma loved Baelfire, bore him a son – Henry, and Emma’s parents were Snow and David, or Charming if you prefer. It was family by association, but family none the less 

Would I have stood at Rumple’s back, or with the trio now accusing him of risking Henry’s life?

I can’t answer that, because I didn’t come out. Against my better judgement I stayed and listened at my ‘Keyhole.’ What I was hoping to hear, I don’t know. I didn’t know these people, or their relationship with Rumple – Mr. Gold to them in this world – and I knew I shouldn’t judge the situation without first understanding, but I _did_ judge… everything and everyone, and fell the hardest back upon old patterns; being most critical toward Rumplestiltskin.

You may ask why, if I love him so much, as I do and always did, _was_ I so hard on him; never gave him the benefit of any doubt. I wanted to, God knows I did, especially then, to believe that he had changed – could change… for our love, for _me._ Selfish to think that way, and fearful too. It has taken many years for me to realize that my desire to change Rumple was more for myself than for him, and that if I _really_ had acted on our love, I would have given to trust; defended at more turns than I ever did, if not his actions, then his motives, and allowed our story to play out entirely the way it should. I would have understood what I had always seen: that behind the Beast there is and always had been, a man – and not just _any_ man, but a man that was born to be the opposite of broken, dark and lost.

My _Savior_.

“Well, that is quite a litany of grievances, now, isn't it?” Rumple purred, that quiet sarcasm with which he always dealt with people that challenged him, evident in abundance.

“Maybe I don't need answers. Maybe I just need to punch you in the face,” Emma threatened.

My hackles rose again, or perhaps I should admit in a different way. I know that Rumple did not need my protection from these people, would _never_ need it, except perhaps in other ways than physical, but the thought of her laying a hand to my Rumple in violence, intending to hurt, had me wanting to step out and demand a stop to the nonsense I was hearing, and yet still I remained, almost in dread fascination to hear the history unfolding to my ears.

Rumple was laughing now.

“Oh, really, Dearie?” he said, and I heard the sound of him moving; imagined him stepping closer to Emma in the way he often did; to dominate by proximity. “Allow me to answer your questions with some of my own, all right?” The briefest of pauses, almost not even a breath’s length. “Did your dear boy, Henry, survive?”

“Yeah,” she admitted.

“Is the curse broken?” Rumple went on, “And let’s see here, Miss Swan, how long have you been searching for your parents? Looks like you’re reunited.”

Another breath’s pause.

“Seems like rather than a punch in the face, I deserve a thank you.”

“Twist my words all you want,” Emma snapped, and then returning to the original question, demanded, “What was the purple haze that you brought?”

“You know.” Rumple said, and added a single word, which brought to my mind the Rumple I knew of old, from the Dark Castle, cursed no more or less than now, but with his ‘impish’ appearance – as Killian would have you believe – a crocodile’s skin. “Magic!”

“Why?” Snow asked, and was flat out denied her answer.

“Not telling.”

A third time I considered revealing my presence, coming upon Rumple, this time truly meaning to stand at his back, _knowing_ that there must be a compelling reason that Rumple brought magic to this world that existed without it. This time, a terrible rumbling, one which shook the store, prevented my moving, and fearing the truth of what was happening, I stayed my course of only listening when I should not have.

“What the _hell_ was that?” Emma asked, and in his calm, almost lazily bored voice Rumple answered.

“That is my gift to you,” he said. “That is gonna take care of Regina.”

My heart lurched on hearing those words, as though suddenly squeezed by a cold hand and then released to a rush of incoming pain – and yes, I have experienced such a moment in reality, so to describe it that way is no exaggeration. I felt… lost and betrayed. He had promised me, hadn’t he, that he wouldn’t kill Regina? How, then, could he do this; send some… monstrous agent after her? Wasn’t that the _same_ as acting by his own hand?

I wanted to confront him there and then, but some strange sense of loyalty stayed my hand, even as I willed them to leave so that I could speak with Rumple before my temper – and I know I _have_ a temper – could get the better of _me._

Snow and David called Emma away, but before she left, I heard her challenge Rumple one more time, and once again, my annoyance piqued at her audacity.

“We’re not done,” she said.

“Oh, I know,” Rumple answered, “You still owe me a favor.”

Once they left… oh once they left…

I have never before considered myself to be a jealous person, though I have since learned that that particular trait is more than well enough developed for my own taste or comfort, but I know now that at least part of my annoyance was born of jealousy in the way that Emma had spoken with Rumple. That these people had a recent history with him, whereas I had been kept from him whom I love beyond reason, added to the hornets buzzing around in my head and my heart.

As he greeted me as though nothing had occurred, it pushed me over the edge.

“You lied to me!”

I put all of the feelings that I could grasp – the crushed hope, the sense of betrayal, the twist and sting in the tail that was our love in that moment, and my anger… a broiling mass of it, into those four words.

He could have said one of a hundred things to me, then, that might have gone some way to defuse that anger and those emotions, but in the end – perhaps forgetting himself in his own annoyance at the accusations leveled at him by the others – he chose the one thing he must have _known_ would drive a wedge between the two of us.

Rumple will tell you – now at least – that he doesn’t care what other people think of him.  He has his own reasons for his actions and his words, and that they are just that: _his_. Sometimes I wonder though, if that, too, isn’t some form of self-deception. He cares more than he will admit about many things – of that I’m almost certain, but…

“No,” he said. “I… I kept my word. _I_ will not kill her.”

The words coalesced my disappointment into a single barbed arrow that split my already aching heart.

“You toy with words like you do people,” I spat at him. “You’re still a man who makes wrong choices.”

He looked down then, and I might have known from the action itself, if not from his next words to me – words born of pain, and meant to reflect that pain back to the sender, even though he would as soon tear out his own heart than ever hurt me – that what I had said had reached him; my accusation hurting him.

Would there ever be healing and peace for us?

“I thought you’d changed,” I said, as much as a warning to myself as a disclosure to Rumple.

“What, in the hour you’ve known me?” he asked, his sarcasm heavy as he scoffed at my hope.

It hurt, and I did the only thing I could think to at the time, I headed for the door. That act alone must have woken Rumple to the escalating harm we were already causing each other in denying both of our inner natures.

“Belle, I… I… I’m sorry,” he said. “Belle, I’m sorry.”

I paused as he repeated himself. Did I believe him? Perhaps not then – though in all of our years since then I have come to understand that apology and the sense behind it far more, and no better and in no other time than when our child first came.

“I am,” he implored me, but I was too hurt to hear him then, and left, slamming the door behind me.

It was to be a pattern, repeating… recurring… and damaging until we each recognized it for what it truly was. Light and Dark, existing in the same space, need just that… space, unless they are to destroy each other, until they learn to dance in and out of the points between – the shadows. Once we learned that, we strengthened each other. He sharpened me, allowed my self-definition in his shielding embrace just as much as I did him, revealing all his edges and contours, and the beautiful complicated soul he truly is… I weep often at the rightness of it.

It would be many years, and often by accident, before we could realize that truth and be deliberately the best and most loving versions of ourselves, _for_ ourselves and for each other, and only as we passed thought our greatest darkness to reach it, that we learned that truth… that we found, once again, our true love.

That day though, angry and hurt – and trying desperately to make sense of it all, because the last thing I wanted was to let go of the love I had just rediscovered for the man, for all his faults, I wandered Storybrooke, and the woods, and found myself at the well again. Standing there, with my hand on the cold stone, I began to ask myself questions.

Why had he been so angry, so desperate to protect me when he’d discovered what Regina had done to me that he would wriggle between the words to make a truth of his promise to me not to kill her? Why had he wanted to if he had no feelings for me at all as he’d tried to make me believe?

Hadn’t he admitted on the way to the well, as I’d said outright that _I_ loved him, that he loved me in return, and promised that we’d have time to explore that love.

He’d sent me away from the Dark Castle, because I’d loved him, because something in that love had been a threat to him… to something of him…? How could I walk away when all I wanted was to be at his side and express that love in a way that wouldn’t harm him, wouldn’t come between him and… what?

But the loudest question came as I dared to wonder what he might do without me to temper his anger, as I had before on more than a few occasions. How much more would he darken his heart. How much more quickly would I lose him forever?

The pain in _that_ thought, the fear of _that_ turned me back to him sooner than needing to adventure to break a curse and save another from losing their love and their life, as when I rescued Prince Philip from a cursed life as the Yaoguai.

Rumple was spinning when I got back to the shop… just wool this time, not straw into gold. Our greeting was short: a simple ‘Hi,’ exchanged for a ‘hey’ before I stated the obvious.

“I, uh, went for a long walk,” I told him.

“I thought you didn’t wanna see me,” he answered, and I could hear the pain – no… the resignation – in his voice.

“I didn’t,” I admitted, “but I was worried.”

“Well, the beast is gone. Regina lives.”

I wish I had told him then that it was not Regina that I was worried for, but him… his life, his heart, his soul.

I didn’t though. Instead suggested, “So, uh, you didn’t get what you wanted?”

“Well, that remains to be seen,” he said.

I had a retort right _there_ on the tip of my tongue, but before I could speak, I saw it. It stood behind him on a tabletop… the white porcelain, the delicate blue flowers, climbing the sides of it, winding their way to the flaw in the fine china: a single chip…

_…It’s just a cup…_

…but it was so much more – always so much more.

“You, uh, you still have it. My chipped cup,” I said, picking up the cup, my voice surprisingly steady for all that I was melting inside; crying out from my heart to throw everything aside and just wrap my arms around him and never let go.

 He got up from the wheel, his own expression softly pained, emotion spilling from him with every breath, and then he took the cup out of my hand.

“There are many, many things in this shop,” he said, his voice measured, restrained emotion in every syllable he spoke. “But this… this is the only thing I truly cherish.” There was barely a pause, but it might have been as chasm of centuries between one moment and the next as he added, “And now, you must leave.”

“What?” I was caught off guard by that. Leave? Why should I leave? I’d just come back to him, I wanted to stay, I _needed_ to stay. I let my confusion show on my face.

“You must leave,” he repeated, “because despite what you hope, I’m still a monster.”

Looking back, it seems to make perfect sense to have been flooded with relief in that moment. He wasn’t trying to send me away because of my love, but because of the way he perceived himself, and thought I would, or should, perceive him. I softened, filled my expression with my love and took him by the shoulders. I found his gaze and sank into it, drew him into mine.

“Don’t you see?” I said, my eyes shining, hoping my light could clear away his sorrowing confusion. “That’s exactly the reason I have to stay.”


End file.
